The present invention relates to the provision of telecommunication services. In the past, there has been no consistent interface between telecommunication service providers' networks and their customers' premises wiring. For instance, telephone service often has been hard-wired to the customer's premises wiring by a variety of methods, rendering service calls unnecessarily complicated and intrusive. Such service calls often required service personnel to enter the customer premises, creating logistical issues for the telecommunication service provider and increasing customer frustration. Moreover, the lack of any discrete interface between the customer's premises wiring and the provider's network sometimes forced the use of proprietary hardware from the customer's perspective and limited the provider's flexibility when considering options to upgrade or otherwise modify the network.
This problem has been exacerbated by the increased number of telecommunication services provided to customer premises. For instance, many telecommunication service providers now provide xDSL service to their customers, but those skilled in the art will recognize that there is little (if any) standardization among providers. Thus, implementations vary widely, each requiring different hardware and software configurations to be operable, and customers have little flexibility in choosing hardware. For instance, ADSL service frequently is deployed differently than VDSL service, and ADSL deployments themselves can vary from provider to provider. Likewise, telephone wiring schemes can vary widely among customer premises, requiring different types of hardware to enable and enhance services, such as filters to control interference, and the like. Further, a typical customer premises has multiple wiring networks, including one for video distribution (cable, satellite, VDSL, and the like), one for data distribution (Ethernet or the like, perhaps with a connection to an xDSL modem or cable modem), and another for telephone service, and these networks generally operate independently of one another. And if a customer wants to add a new telecommunication service, an expensive service call (often including one or more new cable drops and/or the installation of new premises wiring) likely will be required.
Similarly, while a single telecommunication customer often will receive several telecommunication services from a variety of providers, each of those services generally will require both its own access point to the customer premises as well as its own transport medium within the customer premises. This undesirable duplication not only can add expense to the provision of telecommunication service, it often multiplies the logistic and maintenance issues associated with providing and receiving the telecommunication services.
For instance, those skilled in the art will recognize that a typical customer might have satellite television service and xDSL Internet service. Each of these services might require one or more access points to the house. A satellite dish might require, for example, a dedicated coaxial connection from the dish to each television at the consumer premises. Moreover, a telephone jack often is required at one or more of the television locations, to provide an upstream connection from the customer premises to the satellite provider (for instance, to provide billing information, etc.) Likewise, xDSL service typically will require a DSL modem, as well as an Ethernet connection with each device for which Internet access is desired. Thus, while neither satellite service nor typical xDSL service alone can provide a robust data/video solution to compete with broadband cable providers, there also is no facility for combining these services seamlessly at a customer premises.
Given the wide variety of telecommunication information and services available in the marketplace, it would be helpful if a single provider could allow multiple information providers to initiate services to a customer premises, increasing both efficiency for the providers and ease-of-use for the customer. This proliferation of telecommunication services also has created a need for a more flexible interface between the telecommunication service provider's network and the customer's premises. It would be beneficial for such interfaces to use maximize usage of existing infrastructure used to deliver telecommunication services to customer premises.